A typical disc drive, such as an XBOX® 360 Optical Disc Drive (ODD) utilizes a unique software key to authenticate the disc drive against a processor, such as a game console (e.g., XBOX® 360 game console). The unique key is stored in memory on the disc drive. A known method of defeating this authentication scheme includes harvesting the unique key from an authentic disc drive. The firmware (software embedded on a hardware device) of another disc drive is modified by inserting the unique key into the firmware of the other disc drive. When the modified disc drive is used with the processor (e.g., game console), the processor determines that the disc drive is authentic.